A Day's Work

Although my brother has worked in box factories for most of his adult life, I don't have a single photo of him or anyone else at the factory nor of the factory itself. It is probably just as well because the photo would not have been sepia and I would not have felt right submitting it for this week's Sepia Saturday challenge.

I scoured my vintage photos and found not one of a box factory nor of boxes. I did find many women in dangerously long skirts, but none of them were working. I was left with women in short skirts working and men at work but not working.

The photo above has an inscription on the back: "Dad [Henderson Hessick] when he worked for Huffmans." Henderson is my grandfather-in-law. He is the second man from the left, or the man standing on the left. We don't know who the Huffmans were or what he did for them, but whatever it was it must have involved using a pickaxe.

The above photo is my other grandfather-in-law. It, too, has an inscription but it simply says "Claude P. [Parker]". There are no clues of what the short building behind him may be or why he is standing in front of it. But he looks very proud in this photo and we do know that he was very handy with wood, so perhaps he was rebuilding this place. Could it be his first home? We may never know, but will continue to question.

This photo is one of my favorites. The little girl is my mother when she was 4 years old and the woman behind her is her grandmother. This is her first train ride, it was going from Chicago to North Brook. Great-Grama wrote"...and did we have fun. You bet. She enjoyed getting drinking water on train and a great kick out of the toilet." While neither Mom nor Great-Grama are working, the conductor that is helping Mom down is. And he is doing a fine job of it, too.

The above photo is Great-Grama again nearly 30 years later. It looks like she is preparing to enter a motel room. No, she is not working...the lady in the background appears to be a maid and she is working.

This is me mowing my grandparents' lawn. I was not paid for this hard labor, probably because my grandparents did not wish to be arrested for violation of the child labor laws. I can only assume that they used some sort of Tom Sawyer-like logic on me to get me to happily perform this work.

If you want to see some boxes, or box factories, or women in dangerously long skirts working, follow the Sepia Saturday blog posts. Then join the fun with your own interpretation of the prompt.

Thanks for dropping by.